National Videogame Museum WAD (v1.0 Released!)

[QuakinDoom]

Hey everyone!

The National Videogame Museum WAD is now officially released!
This WAD is a near 1:1 recreation of the National Videogame Museum located in Frisco, Texas!

 

A little back story...

 

My name is Chris, and I'm co-owner of the video game studio DevHour Games, as well as the tour guide for the National Videogame Museum.

I started working with the museum within a few months of their opening in 2016, and they have become an extremely influential part of my life.

One day, one of the owners, asked if I could recreate the entirety of the museum within the Doom engine for use in one of their exhibits. How could I say no?

After over a year of tinkering in my off time, version 1.0 is finally complete, and available for download!

Specifications:

 

• MapMaker: GZDoomBuilder
• Ports: Tested in GZDoom & ZDoom. Had some issues in Brutal Doom that I'm trying to iron out.
  • Note: For those of you who played the Beta version of NVMDoom, please note that the Release version has been converted to Doom 2. A LOT has been changed!
• IWAD: DOOM 2
• Maps/Content: MAP01 + 2 Secret Maps (The secret maps were added per request of the owners of the NVM)
• Settings: NVMDoom is meant to be played with vanilla settings, but will work fine with Free Look & Jump enabled.
• Gameplay/Difficulty: Tourism Mode contains No Enemies on MAP 01 so you can enjoy the sights. The other 3 Difficulties are akin to normal Doom 2 difficulties.

Side-by-Side Comparison:
 

Screenshots

 

 

Download Link:

https://www.moddb.com/mods/national-videogame-museum/downloads/nvmdoom

Please let me know what you think!
- Chris

 

 

 

Edited July 30, 2020 by QuakinDoom

[Terminus]

Screenshots look great! Clearly a lot of love, passion and effort went into making this.

 

[taufan99]

Big fan of arcade-themed mods here, gotta pick this up!

[Senor500]

This looks wonderful, great work!

[Redneckerz]

A wonderful spiritual semi-sequel to ArsDoom. :)

 

 

[TontonMayonnaise]

It seems to be a hell of an accomplishment ! That'a a great homage to the videogame lore (don't know if I'm using the good words)...

There are so much details on every console you modeled ... Thumb up I say !

[phoo]

This looks amazing! I love the attention to detail.

[QuakinDoom]

I appreciate the praise! In regards to the detail, I wanted to make the environment really feel alive. I wanted to load into Doom and get that same feeling I get as I walk through the doors of the museum. I felt the best way to do that would be to include every little detail I could possibly squeeze in. So far, there are around 123 custom sprites and 174 custom textures, with many more still to come. I'm estimating the final count to be somewhere around 200 custom textures and nearly 180 custom sprites in this one map.

Here's a what the map looks like in the builder. I built it best I could using the actual blueprints provided by the Museum. It's honestly kind of beautiful in itself.

[taufan99]

In addition, I think it'd be cool to have a few simple games (eg. Space Invaders) in the museum playable by ACS a la ACS Arcade. Of course, that doesn't mean I ask you to do it by yourself, but rather if somebody else would like to elaborate in the work.

[QuakinDoom]

1 minute ago, InDOOMnesia said:

In addition, I think it'd be cool to have a few simple games (eg. Space Invaders) in the museum playable by ACS a la ACS Arcade. Of course, that doesn't mean I ask you to do it by yourself, but rather if somebody else would like to elaborate in the work.

If I could manage to get the large pong console located in the main lobby of the map actually functional and playable, I think the owners would absolutely loose their collective mind. I had not heard of ACS Arcade before. I'm going to give it a download and check this out!

[ETPC]

oh my god this rules

[Mr.Rocket]

17 hours ago, QuakinDoom said:

If I could manage to get the large pong console located in the main lobby of the map actually functional and playable, I think the owners would absolutely loose their collective mind. I had not heard of ACS Arcade before. I'm going to give it a download and check this out!

That and the Duck Hunt!

 

This is pretty cool!

Also if you plan on staying Gzdoom based because of ACS scripts etc, you might think about updating the detail of the custom textures to hi-res, at least for the video game screens.

Eg. you can have a 512x512 texture and scale it 42x42 keeping the 512x detail. ;)

 

Also, brightmaps and (dynamic lighting opengl) could really change the atmosphere of the place.

 

Good luck!

 

Edit:

Found a small bug, the blue door has a line tag next to it that makes the counter space next to the door raise up and down.

~ just need to remove the tag from that little line. ;)

 

 

Edited March 31, 2020 by Mr.Rocket

[QuakinDoom]

2 hours ago, Mr.Rocket said:

Also if you plan on staying Gzdoom based because of ACS scripts etc, you might think about updating the detail of the custom textures to hi-res, at least for the video game screens.

Eg. you can have a 512x512 texture and scale it 42x42 keeping the 512x detail. ;)

I'm honestly kicking myself about the texture details. It's a long story, but I'll try to keep it short...

A year or so ago when I started this project, all of the textures were indeed hi-res... but I converted all of them down to low-res versions as I was initially shooting to have this running on a Raspberry Pi running Chocolate Doom. Of course, I learned about Chocolate Doom's limitations on linedefs (which this map has thousands of) AFTER I converted every single texture to a low-res version. Since I couldn't possibly adhere to the linedef limitation, I managed to convince the museum to switch to ZDoom, but the damage was already done to the textures. I want to go back and fix them, but that's for another day...

 

2 hours ago, Mr.Rocket said:

Also, brightmaps and (dynamic lighting opengl) could really change the atmosphere of the place.

 

Good luck!

 

Edit:

Found a small bug, the blue door has a line tag next to it that makes the counter space next to the door raise up and down.

~ just need to remove the tag from that little line. ;)

 

Brightmaps are definitely coming! and thanks for the bug report :)

[Mr.Rocket]

np, on the side of hi-res textures, it should be rather trivial as you already have place holders in the map.

All should be required is a textures folder with all those original quality images in it, and then a textures.txt/script.

The images saved as png and hold the same name as the current patch name texture(s) in the map. and then a small script for each one.

I was only suggesting the monitor textures though, it would make a big difference.

 

I'd be willing to help, but I would need those original images to do so. ;)

[Redneckerz]

@QuakinDoom you can find coverage of your WAD on Realm667 coming this Monday. Doom belongs in a museum. ;)

[Walter confetti]

This looks pretty charming, it have that huge 1996/97 map style that fills me of nostalgia....

Over the blue door line near the blue door that @Mr.Rocket find out, you can enter in the red key room by jumping trough the windows, is that intentional?

Otherwise, make windows at the red key room impassible.

[Gez]

Talking about things we can do in ZDoom, you could use slopes for those arcade cabinets, make them look more like this:

and less like that:

[QuakinDoom]

On 4/1/2020 at 9:21 AM, Mr.Rocket said:

np, on the side of hi-res textures, it should be rather trivial as you already have place holders in the map.

All should be required is a textures folder with all those original quality images in it, and then a textures.txt/script.

The images saved as png and hold the same name as the current patch name texture(s) in the map. and then a small script for each one.

 

Good point! This will probably be a bit easier then I anticipated. I'll probably save this for the polish phase.

 

20 hours ago, Walter confetti said:

Over the blue door line near the blue door that @Mr.Rocket find out, you can enter in the red key room by jumping trough the windows, is that intentional?

That is not intentional at all! Thanks for pointing that out. I'll make sure this gets fixed.

 

 

10 hours ago, Gez said:

Talking about things we can do in ZDoom, you could use slopes for those arcade cabinets

 

Could you point in me the direction of a tutorial or explain how to do this? I'm still relatively new to map making, and have not been able to figure slopes out AT ALL. I've seen some documentation mentioning that it was possible, but never an explicit explanation of how to pull them off.

[Gez]

The simplest, given your map, is to use Plane Align. Note the list of "Doom map format types", because since your map is in Doom map format, you cannot use it directly as explained in the documentation (181 with parameters). In this case, I determined that 343 was what was most appropriate, given the way your cabinets were constructed.

slopedmap01.zip

 

 

What else. If you do make back the high-res original textures, the simplest is to create in your pk3 file a hires folder and dump them there. You can keep them in PNG or JPG format. With the same name as the low-res textures. This will make ZDoom automatically scale them to give them the same in-world dimensions as the low-res textures and sprites, but with all the details intact. And all the color depth, too, if using GZDoom.

 

Some of the custom objects seem to be quite a bit larger than they should be. I got blocked by game boxes while running next to a display. Kinda weird.

[QuakinDoom]

2 hours ago, Gez said:

The simplest, given your map, is to use Plane Align. Note the list of "Doom map format types", because since your map is in Doom map format, you cannot use it directly as explained in the documentation (181 with parameters). In this case, I determined that 343 was what was most appropriate, given the way your cabinets were constructed.

slopedmap01.zip

 

 

What else. If you do make back the high-res original textures, the simplest is to create in your pk3 file a hires folder and dump them there. You can keep them in PNG or JPG format. With the same name as the low-res textures. This will make ZDoom automatically scale them to give them the same in-world dimensions as the low-res textures and sprites, but with all the details intact. And all the color depth, too, if using GZDoom.

 

Some of the custom objects seem to be quite a bit larger than they should be. I got blocked by game boxes while running next to a display. Kinda weird.

 

Thanks for the info! Hopefully I can work on getting those slopes integrated on Sunday when I've got time to pick work back up on this. Yeah, the custom sprites are way too big in some areas. I've cut back on some of the more extreme ones, but there's a few issues here and there. I'll be fixing those as I find them. 

[Gez]

You can download the zip to get started, it's your map with all the arcade cabinets (of that shape) sloped. If you want you can apply that same principle on the sloped ceilings and on some other minor details.

[Lizardcommando]

This was very neat. I liked it. Is there a reason you chose to make this map for Doom instead of Doom 2? Do you plan on changing all the default Doom textures eventually?

[QuakinDoom]

On 4/3/2020 at 12:50 PM, Lizardcommando said:

This was very neat. I liked it. Is there a reason you chose to make this map for Doom instead of Doom 2? Do you plan on changing all the default Doom textures eventually?

Doom was chosen over Doom 2 as the museum exhibit that this WAD is being featured in in is a Doom (1993) Exhibit. I plan on replacing some of the default Doom textures, however I will be leaving the vast majority of them in there as the Museum wants it to still have the look and feel of the first Doom!
 

On 4/1/2020 at 11:15 AM, Redneckerz said:

@QuakinDoom you can find coverage of your WAD on Realm667 coming this Monday. Doom belongs in a museum. ;)

 

That's super exciting! Can't wait to see it.

[Dark Pulse]

A very nice play! It made me wish I could go and see the real thing. Alas, even if the Coronavirus scare weren't happening, Texas is a heck of a trip from New York.

 

I love the little attention to details, the carefully-modeled Game Boys and controllers and such. I think I spotted a Vectrex in there.

 

That said, I'm also sadly reminded of just how bad the original Doom palette is at representing some stuff - a few monitors and game screens I was squinting, trying to figure out what they exactly were!

 

I know you're keeping it vanilla-compatible for the exhibit (and that's cool) but may I suggest also an updated version if you will that takes advantage of source port features as well once it's done? (So that yes, we actually can make out what those games are, have slopes, etc.) Think of it as a "director's cut" or whatever.

 

Glad to see someone else mentioned ArsDoom as well! That's also an interesting WAD to play. (A little bit of nudity though, so be forewarned.)

[QuakinDoom]

I've been rather dormant in posting about this WAD for the last few months, but the entire thing is now complete as of today!
I've got to clean it up a little bit for release, but I expect I should have it ready in the next day or two.
Until then, here's a teaser for one of the multiple Easter Eggs I've added in the last few months. It's quite the "Adventure" ;D
 

 

[QuakinDoom]

Hey everyone!

The National Videogame Museum WAD is now officially released!

Please reference the original post for the juicy updates and the new download link.

[taufan99]

Neato! I remember playing the earlier version of this.

Nice job on the easter egg too!

[Gez]

Doesn't look like you used my slopes. :(

[nepshoryu]

i made an account just to reply to this thread

this is really cool and creative!! i didnt expect to see this while looking for maps, good work!

[QuakinDoom]

7 hours ago, Gez said:

Doesn't look like you used my slopes. :(

Not as of yet! That's planned for the next major update. I'm not done with this sucker yet ;D